With Vista, Microsoft is addressing what's become a sad truth for most people: PCs run more slowly over time. Vista will automatically de-fragment hard disks, make better use of memory to more quickly load programs, and include a new performance control panel that will identify performance bottlenecks, according to the company. Elsewhere, ActiveWin hosts widescreen, high-res screenshots of Vista.

You do know that it's very easy to install a light WM on Windows, hmmm? The installer will automatically disable Explorer and use the new WM next bootup.

Contrary to popular belief, Windows also can use various window managers, and Windows is by no means bound to Explorer. Installing a WM on Windows is a mere case of a simple installer, like any other program. Installing a new WM on Linux can be quite a daunting task (allthough not always).

Yeah, been there and done that, too. Using window managers and browsers other than the default is just another way to make yourself suffer an endless string of 3rd party product failures.

You want to know the best one I ever saw? I changed my Windows XP clock to display "a" and "p" instead of "AM" and "PM." This caused one piece of software to refuse to even run the installer. It claimed it did not support non-American versions of Windows!!

That's using a FEATURE that is BUILT IN to CUSTOMIZE the system the way the USER WANTS. I didn't hack or do anything that is not OFFERED by the OS and it BROKE the installability of software (this is a Windows installer, not some custom home brew thing - it was a product made with VB).

Contrary to popular belief, Windows also can use various window managers, and Windows is by no means bound to Explorer

Is this supported by Microsoft? Will Microsoft take my call on MS Word not running well on Windows XP when they realize that I exchanged explorer.exe by blackbox.exe? If not, then "can use" is not 100% true. I bet you a beer that if I bought support for OpenOffice.org, the company providing this support would not ask me whether I run KDE, GNOME or something else.

Anyway, if MS admits "computers with our OS get slower by time", something is not right. My computers run as fast as when I installed them (most of the do not run Microsoft's system).

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Also, why cannot your posts be moderated? Though I understand you run this site, in my opinion, this does not give you "the licence to be always right". I think that if you want to really join a discussion thread, you should post with an ID that CAN be moderated. Keep your "protected" ID for kicking out trolls and cooling down flamewars.

As it is now, it reminds me of an old saying we used in past to describe our communistic government - "all people are equal, but some of them are more equal than others".

What does replacing Explorer have to do with Office? Pretty much nothing. People that use blackbox instead usually know what they're doing. So if you were having problems with Office and were required to actually call them, I don't see what relevance your shell has.